There’s a new woman in my husband’s life. We met her on our recent vacation to Colorado Springs and he fell for her immediately. Her name is Garmin Nuvi. I know she sounds kind of exotic, but her nickname is Jill. She’s petite, attractive and, unlike me, good with directions.
Jill is a global positioning system device, and I can’t say I blame my husband for his interest in her. I wouldn’t call her a cheap date, but she is very low maintenance. She doesn’t fiddle with the radio or complain about the air conditioning. She never has to stop to use the restroom. She doesn’t sleep across entire states – unless we want her to. And she doesn’t get grumpy when she doesn’t eat, but only because she doesn’t eat – or get grumpy.
Besides her navigational skills, one of Jill’s most endearing qualities is her calm, patient voice. After a few hours, it’s also one of her most irritating qualities. It sounds vaguely familiar too. She must have worked somewhere else before, because I think she put me on hold once.
She’s every bit as bossy as I am, ordering my husband to go this way or that way, something I can never get away with. I think he tolerates it from her because she usually knows what she’s talking about.
She’s not much of a conversationalist either. But he forgives her for that too, maybe because, while she may not indulge him in a conversation about professional baseball, she also never says, “Slow down,” or “Are we there yet?” And if he drives a different way than she told him to, she says “recalculating” in a gentle, non-judgmental, if slightly annoying way. If she feels like saying, “I told you so” or “Why don’t you ever listen to me,” she keeps it to herself.
Jill doesn’t have much in the way of a personality, but then some would say the same of me. And she’s a bit of a show-off. She can speak more than 50 languages and do a variety of different voices and accents. She can also do math calculations, convert Celsius to Fahrenheit instantly, and tell me the time in Tokyo. La-de-da! It’s not like we’ll be driving to Tokyo.
And Jill isn’t perfect by a long shot. She frequently mispronounces words, and more than once during our vacation, she took us to businesses that no longer exist. At her best, she’s a calm reassuring voice in the midst of confusion. At her worst, she’s a backseat driver without the anxiety.
But I have to admit, she’s winning me over. Jill gives directions calmly and in a way I can follow. That is, she doesn’t say “go east, west, north and south” which I’ve never found very useful. Instead, she says, “Turn right” and “turn left.” Even I can handle that, thanks to the hint I’ve used since I was a child: “I write with my right.”
She never uses my least favorite phrase in the world of navigation: “You can’t miss it!” People who say that were never riding with me when I drove by the turn to my house.
And best of all, her directions never take longer than the actual trip: “Turn north where the old service station used to be. You probably weren’t around when it was there, were you? The Johnson’s owned that station – when it was there. Head northeast past the spot where all the dandelions bloomed last spring. Of course, they’re not blooming now. You’ll come to a big blue house on your left. But that’s not it. Keep going . . . and going.”
That’s why I think I’m going to like Garmin Nuvi Jill. She’s friendly and helpful, and she beats folding a map. Besides that, she can be Jack, too.
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Contact drosby@rushmore.com or see www.dorothyrosby.com.
